Abstract

Cultural activism is defined as a set of creative practices and activities which challenge dominant interpretations and constructions of the world while presenting alternative socio-political and spatial imaginaries in ways which challenge relationships between art, politics, participation, and spectatorship. Accordingly, this article discusses the way in which cultural activism was fostered through a festival event with a group of young people from a visible minority migrant background. Drawing on emancipatory methodological approaches, the researcher as a cultural translator/facilitator organized the festival, both as an aesthetic and educative theatrical event. The cultural translator is an individual who is able to share his or her own experiences, provide information that facilitates understanding of the values and perceptions of the dominant culture, and convey ways to meet the behavioral demands made on subordinate members of the society without compromising ethnic values and norms. Accordingly, this article examines the festival event as a third space, through which the participants explored and integrated both subordinate and dominant cultural ideas toward self-affirming epistemologies and achieved positive self-concept of themselves. Through the discussion of theatrical events enacted by the participants the notion of cultural Identity is problematized revealing its two operative factors in identity construction, namely identity as simultaneously the vector of similarity and continuity, and the vector of difference and rupture. The article concludes by affirming that the arts are an important context for cultural activism and identity construction.